Am I the only one that thinks that's CRAZY strong? I mean if you use the new Roland Shield Bash set and stack block chance you'll be able to get close to 100% uptime on the ~5k Life Per Second, 15% Crit Chance and 15% Attack Speed buffs plus CRAZY damage from the 90% AoE and 140% Single Target attacks...

Assuming that the belt will get the same elemental treatment as the Warrior set which has the same effect for Bull Rush, we can infer that we'll also be able to get Roar doing holy damage as well, which has some very interesting synergy with Holy Cause...

Oh god I'd forgotten about both of them.... Does Roar AoE proc the max level gem bonus, that heals you for 2% of your health every time you deal damage with a primary skill?

I'm thinking a Punish spam build might be pretty damn strong! Add in Shield Bash to keep in range and the new Roland's set... Welp I know what I'm farming once 2.1 goes live

Anyone know if Angel Hair Braid gets the same treatment as the Raekor's set, so we can have Holy Roar? Would be all kinds of awesome to have Roar deal Holy damage, which means Holy Cause would heal you for 1% total health every time it procced, then add in the Legendary Gem healing you for 2% every time... Not bad at all!

Depends on how high your health it :P, don't forget 1% health has technically infinite scaling, thanks to Stam from Paragon not having a cap. So once you reach absolute BiS gear your LoH and LpRS will eventually hit a cap of sorts, but Holy Cause (and the Legendary Gem) will continue to scale forever.

With the recent buffs to LOH and LPxSpent I'm not sure how relevant the 1% from Holy Cause will be.

Don't forget, that they changed the way LoH works. It is no longer based on proc coefficient and only can proc once per action. This means that % based healing will be more desired in situations where there are more mobs.

With the recent buffs to LOH and LPxSpent I'm not sure how relevant the 1% from Holy Cause will be.

Don't forget, that they changed the way LoH works. It is no longer based on proc coefficient and only can proc once per action. This means that % based healing will be more desired in situations where there are more mobs.

Wouldn't be surprised if % heals are throttled to once per action in most cases.

@talyn: But at least we can wear the block ring now 4 rando mprimaries + block is sexy

Except we can't really Auto, Because between a Ring of Royal Grandeur, a Stone of Jordan and a Justice Lantern... I'd pick the first two every time. Not to mention with Legendary Gems pretty much meaning you NEED a socket in both rings and your neck...

So my shopping list for 2.1

New Crusader set

Angel Hair Braid

Hellfire Amulet (with a decent passive and a socket :S)

Depth Diggers

RoRG and SoJ (both with Sockets... I've already rerolled my SoJ, so now I need a new one...)

Legendary gems (Probably Simplicity's Strength for boosted Punish damage and healing. Mirinae, Teardrop of Starweaver because of the crazy holy damage and Moratorium for Stagger damage, because it works so well for my Brewmaster :D. IF defense turns out not to be a problem, which tbh it shouldn't I'll swap Mora for Wreath of Lightning for AoE damage)

I've gone from being almost done gearing up... To basically needing a whole new set

Ehhhhhhh.... SoJ is really poor design tbh, I'm of the opinion it should be changed rather tahn being BiS bar none. But I could live with giving up RoRG (and depth diggers) if it meant I had an item that's actually thematically appropriate for once.

I don't see the need for the new Crusader set, really. That lets you remove RoRG. If you want to use the new set, building around Punish in addition to it is fairly weak - Punish could be good if you focus the build around it, but if you split your focus and go with the new set AND Punish build, you'll be wasting slots on buffing a generator you want to be using as little as possible.

There's much better items to compliment a Punish-centric build than that set (as you will rarely be using Shield Bash or Sweep Attack), so if you want to build around it, do it - but don't try to incorporate the new set AND Punish items.

That being said, I think the biggest downfall of a Punish-centric build in general is that Punish is fairly poor AoE. Good single target, will suck for groups.

I don't see the need for the new Crusader set, really. That lets you remove RoRG. If you want to use the new set, building around Punish in addition to it is fairly weak - Punish could be good if you focus the build around it, but if you split your focus and go with the new set AND Punish build, you'll be wasting slots on buffing a generator you want to be using as little as possible.

There's much better items to compliment a Punish-centric build than that set (as you will rarely be using Shield Bash or Sweep Attack), so if you want to build around it, do it - but don't try to incorporate the new set AND Punish items.

That being said, I think the biggest downfall of a Punish-centric build in general is that Punish is fairly poor AoE. Good single target, will suck for groups.

Right now, as it is on PTR. You pretty much right. After doing some testing, it's pretty clear that there is no reason to have Punish in a build centering around Rolands-SB. It just never gets used.

Punish is by far the coolest generating skill in the whole game by. The sad truth though is that it is super situational. Gearing to make a sometimes useful skill stronger just isn't a very sound way to make a strong build. That said, I'll still be messing around with Punish and the Belt to see if any interesting builds can be done, it's just not a build I'll pull out when I wanna do 25+ Grifts

Yeah.

Honestly, if you REALLY want to incorporate a set... If they do something with Thorns before 2.1 hits live (I hope they do - as is, it's not strong enough), I think the Invoker set could be where a Punish build fits in. The higher block chance and effects on block from Punish increase your "tankiness" factor a lot, and since a Thorns build is intended to get you to take as many hits as possible (which synergizes with block procs), it could work well together. Get a really high block chance, do good single target damage, decent AoE (from Invoker set), and take hits like a champ.

Honestly I think the braid will fit nicely with my firestarter build. The use of hit me if you can coupled with punish and renewal may afford me greater survivability in higher grifts whilst not sacrificing a great deal of dps.

Hahah realistically I'll do exactly what I've been doing since D3 was launched...

Play Whatever build I get the gear for :p. If I HAPPEN to get all the peices required to make a certain build work... Bully for me, if not myeh, I'll make something work. I'm only farming T3 at the moment so it's not like I have to use one of the super efficient builds